On the Teaching of Classical Literature

The heart has its own order; the intellect has its own, which is by principle and demonstration. The heart has another. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by enumerating in order the causes of love; that would be ridiculous.

pascal, pensées, #283 (modern library)

It is really quite remarkable what happens when reading a great novel: By identifying with a character, you learn from within what it feels like to be someone else. The great realist novelists, from Jane Austen on, developed a technique for letting readers eavesdrop on the very process of a character’s thought and feelings as they are experienced. Readers watch heroes and heroines in their never-ending process of justifying themselves, deceiving themselves, arguing with themselves. That is something you cannot watch in real life, where we see others only from the outside and have to infer their inner status from their behavior.

gary saul morson, commentary, 2015¹

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Not a few critics have remarked that if someone wants to study history or literature, the best places to avoid in the universities are the history and English departments. Though universities, as we know them, were founded in the Middle Ages to sort out and know the truth, many in our time find this, to recall Pascal’s words, a “ridiculous” assumption. Pascal also hinted that we could approach this same truth in two ways, one through the intellect and one through the heart. The methods were not the same. We do not “prove” that we are loveable by listing the “causes” of love. But we may just find that we are loveable if someone loves us for no reason apparent to us. In great part, literature is a record of men and women who have discovered this fact that they are loved, though it always surprises them. In a like manner, literature is an account of those who have made themselves unlovable even in the eyes of those who continue to love them. The least bad thing we could say of a person who listed the ten best reasons why he was lovable to others would be that he was hopelessly vain, if not sinfully prideful.

In quite a fine essay, Gary Saul Morson at Northwestern University recounted his experience as a professor of Russian literature.² Students at that university, it turns out, contrary to the statistics, do show interest in literature once they actually read a classic novel or two. Most people know that few more gripping pieces of literature exist than classic Russian novels. Such novels Morson, for many years, has had the good fortune to teach to hundreds and hundreds of students. He sets out to examine the reasons why most students, in most universities, however, do not seem to find the reading of literature the riveting experience that Morson knows it to be.

In today’s universities, students are often taught to begin “specialization and research” right from the beginning. They have to “choose their major and minor” quickly to fulfill requirements. Before they have a chance to look at everything, they are busy looking at some tiny thing. I have no doubt that, with enough insight and time bordering on eternity, anyone can get to everything from some existing thing. Conversely, with a little reason, most people can get to something from universal ideas. The question here is: “How do students discover these literary works with so many conflicting demands on their time and so many competing estimates about what is important?” In one way, the answer is easy. Each of us just has to sit down and read them. Quite often, the first paragraph of a story incites us to follow it to the end.

It takes a cold heart not to be moved by War and Peace or The Possessed, provided, that is, that one is reading the novel itself, not a summary of it and certainly not a theory about its structure or an analysis of the conditions of the time and place that purport to explain it in sociological or psychological terms. But...